Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame Server Sizing Techniques

There are several tools and techniques that you can use to determine the capacity and performance of your MetaFrame Presentation Servers. To do this, you’ll need to simulate user load on your servers and record the performance of the system.

There are several tools and techniques that you can use to determine the capacity and performance of your MetaFrame Presentation Servers. To do this, you’ll need to simulate user load on your servers and record the performance of the system. From there, you’ll be able to determine the system’s bottlenecks and capacity limits. Regardless of the exact tool or technique that you use, all capacity planning and testing follows the same basic methodology:

Choose the application or applications that you would like to use for the load testing.

Determine what tasks a user will do within that application.

Determine what performance speed or response time is required.

Determine how users use the application.

Create a script or automated process that can simulate a user using the application.

Results from this method of server testing should tell you two things:

How many users the server can support.

How the server performs when it is highly loaded. (For example, does performance lag for current sessions, or does it stop accepting new sessions?)

Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the testing steps.

Step 1. Choose your Test Application

When testing the performance of a server, the first thing you need to do is identify an application or applications to test. Ideally, you’ll be able to test the applications that are most important to your business.

Step 2. Determine Test Tasks

Once you’ve determined an application that you want to use for your testing, you need to think about what users will be doing with that application. Is it a line-of-business application where users will be entering data into forms and running reports on that data, or is it a spreadsheet application where users will be performing calculations? Maybe it’s a word processing application where users write documents?

Step 3. Determine Appropriate Response Times

Once you figure out how you will test the application, you need to determine what the appropriate application response time is. This will help you determine whether a server is too busy. For example, if your test application is Microsoft Word, you might determine that a letter must appear on the screen within 0.2 seconds of the user pressing the key. This would be your threshold for acceptable performance. Later on in your testing process, you may find that your server can support 130 simultaneous users before crashing, although each user has to wait 0.5 seconds for the key response delay. In this case, you may find that you can only support 80 users with the 0.2 second response time. Even though your consultant says 130, you would know that your server can really only support 80 users.

As another example, your users might need to pull up reports in a line of business application. You need to determine what the appropriate wait time is for them. If you decide that a user should not have to wait more than 15 seconds for a report, then it is unacceptable to put 60 users on a server if they must each wait 20 seconds for their reports.

Step 4. Determine how Users Use the Application

Once you determine the appropriate responsiveness of your applications, you need to determine how active your users are. For example, some users enter data into a screen, then rummage around through papers at their desk, then enter more data. For these users, you might discover that they can enter the data in 10 seconds, but that they only do this once per minute. On the other hand, more active users might perform the same 10-second transaction six times per minute.

Knowing your mix of users is important, because a server that can support 75 “slow” users might only be able to support 40 active users.

Step 5. Create the Application Simulation Script

Now that you’ve thought about the application that you would like to test and the way that users will use the application, you can begin thinking about the testing process itself. The main technique that you’ll use in your capacity planning is to have multiple users access your application at the same time. By watching the performance of the system during this time, you can determine how the system will scale.Instead of finding a bunch of users and asking them to “use the system” while you watch the performance, most people create user simulation scripts. These scripts simulate users using the system. The nice thing about creating a script is that you (as one single person) can test hundreds of users accessing the system at the same time. The other advantage of using a script instead of test users is that you can get consistent, repeatable loads and thus you’ll know if any changes you make to the server actually affect performance.

An application simulation script is essentially a batch file that automates the process of a user launching and using an application. There are dozens of tools on the market that can be used to script your user sessions.

These tools offer a “recording” mode that allows you to perform some functions (such as typing a document, browsing the web, using PeopleSoft, etc). Once a script is recorded, you can play it back to simulate a user using the system.

When your application simulation script is complete, you should end up with a file or files that you can launch from the command line. (For example, “autoit.exe /word” or “myappscript.cmd.”) The script should launch the application and then begin “playing back” the simulated user interaction.

Step 6. Prepare to Monitor the Performance

Before you start your testing, you need to configure your system so that it records the performance of your server during the testing. It’s very important that your testing data is logged and saved. While you’re conducting the test, you will be focused on creating a good test. You don’t want to worry about trying to view the results of the test as you’re conducting it. It’s much better to to record the results so that you can view them in detail at a later time.

Think back to your Windows 2000 training. Do you remember how to use Performance Monitor to record performance counters to a log file so that you can view them later?

Expand the tree under “Performance Logs and Alerts” in the left pane. Right-click on “Counter Logs” and choose “New Log Settings…”

Type a name for your new log file. (This should be a “friendly” name, such as “50 user test with MS Word.”

Click the “Add…” button on the screen that pops up. This is where you choose the specific counters to record. (Keep reading for a list of counters that actually matter when testing MetaFrame servers.)

Highlight each counter and instance that you would like to record and click the “Add” button to add them to the log file. After you’ve selected all the counters you’d like, click the “Close” button to go back to the log file settings screen.

By default, the system is configured to record a sample of the data every 15 seconds. Depending on your test size and hard drive space, you might want to increase the frequency to every 5 seconds or so.

If you would like to change the path of the log file, you may do so by clicking the “Log Files” tab.

You can also click on the “Schedule” tab to configure your log file so that it automatically starts and stops at specific times, although most people don’t do this when they’re running specific tests.

Once your counter log is fully configured, it will appear in list in the Performance MMC. When it’s time for your testing to begin, you can start the log by right-clicking it and selecting “Start” from the context menu. The icon next to the log will change from red to green.

Now that you know how to configure and save performance logs, there’s one question that needs to be answered: What performance counters should you monitor? While there are many books that list “standard” performance counters and what they do, in the real world, there are only a few counters that matter when sizing MetaFrame servers. At a minimum, you should capture the following performance counters when conducting your tests:

Memory: Pages/secThis counter shows the number of times per second that the server looked for something in physical memory, but instead was forced to go to the paging file on the hard drive. (Technically, this is known as a “hard page fault.”) Ideally this number stays around zero. Any sustained value up around 20 or 30 indicates that you need might need more memory (or fewer users).

It’s important not to confuse the “Pages/sec” counter with “Page Faults/sec.” The Page Faults/sec performance counter shows the total of hard and soft page faults. Soft page faults occur when the system is ultimately able to find what it needs in memory without going to disk. Soft page faults are not as bad as hard page faults. (It’s like “good” cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol.) The important thing to remember here is that you track the “Pages/sec” counter, not the “Page Faults/sec” counter.

Processor: % Processor Time: _TotalThis counter shows how busy the processors are. If it pegs at 100% then you definitely need more of something. If the processor is too busy, don’t automatically think that you need more processing power. For example, the processor might be busy because you’re running out of memory, and the processor is spending a lot of unneeded time writing to and reading from the paging file.

If you notice that the processor utilization is fairly high, you might want to track the System: Processor Queue Length counter as well. This counter shows how many requests are backed up while they wait for the processor to get freed up to service them. By tracking this, you can see if the processor is very busy or too busy. (Yes, there is a difference.) A processor that is very busy might show 100% utilization, but it will back down as soon as another request comes through. You could see this because the Processor Queue Length would be almost zero. A processor that is too busy might also show 100% utilization, except that because it’s too busy it cannot service additional requests, meaning that the Processor Queue Length would begin to fill up.

Physical Disk: % Disk TimeThis counter essentially shows you how busy your server’s hard drives are. A value of 100% would indicate that the disks are 100% busy, meaning that you might need faster disks, more memory, or fewer users. Like with the processor counters, if your % Disk Time counter is at or near 100, you might also want to monitor the Physical Disk: Current Disk Queue Length counter. This counter will tell you how many disk requests are waiting because the disk is too busy.

If you have multiple physical disks in your server (that are not mirrored), you should record a separate instance of this counter for each disk instead of one counter for the total disks. That way, you can determine whether your disks are being used evenly, or if one disk is overworked while the other sits idle.

Network Interface: Bytes Total/secIf you’re worried about the utilization of the server’s network card, you might want to record the Bytes Total/sec of the card. If you do this, keep in mind that a 10 Mb/second network interface is 10 megabits, and the performance counter tracks bytes. Since there are 8 bits in a byte, the performance counter would max out at 1.25M bytes. If you factor in physical network overhead, the actual maximum of a 10Mb network is about one megabyte per second.

In the real world, most MetaFrame servers are connected to the network at 100Mb speeds or faster, and other server hardware components max out long before the network interface.

Terminal Services: Active SessionsThis performance counter simply provides a count of the total number of ICA sessions (or RDP sessions) that are active on your server. This counter is extremely valuable when you’re analyzing your performance logs after you’ve captured them. It lets you see exactly how many users were active at any given time during the log period.

In addition to these specific performance counters, there are six performance objects that are MetaFrame-specific and Terminal Services-specific. Most people forget that they exist. These object classes include:

ICA Session counters monitor the details of specific (or the aggregate totals of) ICA session bandwidth, including printing, compression, and the various virtual channels. (If you don’t have MetaFrame XPe then you will only be able to see the latency-related ICA session counters.)

Terminal Services Session counters monitor the details of specific sessions from the perspective of Terminal Services. These counters are similar to the ICA Session counters, except that they monitor the Terminal Server-specific elements of each session. These elements include the percentage of processor time that a session uses, the number of handles and threads a session has open, session input and output bytes, frames, errors, and cache performance of a session.

Step 7. Conduct the Test

Now that you have your application simulation scripts created and are ready to monitor the performance of the server during the test, you can begin the actual testing process. At first, you might think that you need to connect dozens of client workstations and manually invoke your scripts on each one, but fortunately there is a cool utility from Citrix called the Citrix Server Test Kit (CSTK) that can automate this process.

The CSTK is a utility used to run application simulation scripts from multiple ICA clients. It can even launch several sessions from a single client. Basically, it allows you (as a single person) to run tests that simulate dozens or even hundreds of users on one server. From there, you can watch your server’s performance with different user loads. The CSTK is free, although you have to download it from the Citrix Developer Network (www.citrix.com/cdn). It does not come on the MetaFrame CD.

To use the CSTK, you will need several ICA clients in addition to the server that you want to test. These can be any platform and any type of ICA client, although there are advantages (that will become apparent later) to using 32-bit Windows clients.

The CSTK can run multiple ICA sessions from one client as long as the client device can support multiple ICA sessions and it has the resources to run as many sessions as you plan to test on it. Realistically, memory is usually the limiting factor. A good rule of thumb is that you need about 12MB of memory for each session that you want to run on a client device. For example, a Windows workstation with 128MB of memory should be able to support about 10 simultaneous ICA sessions. If you want to test your server with 100 user sessions, you would need 10 workstations, each with 128MB of memory.

Several components make up a complete CSTK environment:

The CSTK Console. This is the main interface to the CSTK. It allows you to start and stop your tests, apply simulation scripts, and configure test user accounts.

The user simulation scripts. These are the scripts that you created back in Step 5. The CSTK comes with some generic scripts for basic tasks (such as using Internet Explorer, calculator, notepad, etc). It also comes with more robust scripts for Office 97 and Office 2000.

The CSTK Client. This is a small program that runs in every ICA test session. It is responsible for running the user simulation scripts. It’s added to the “All Users\Startup” folder when you install the CSTK.

The Client Launcher Utility. This program can be used on 32-bit Windows clients to automatically launch multiple ICA sessions that are used to run the test scripts. In small test environments, this tool is not necessary. However, if you plan to test 20 sessions from a single workstation, this tool will save you from having to manually start and logon to 20 different sessions.

In order to understand how the CSTK works, let’s review step-by-step how it’s used:

1. The first thing you need to do is to prepare your environment. Ideally, you’ll be able to run your tests on an isolated test network. Gather your MetaFrame server and the necessary ICA client devices. (You’ll probably want to activate the Citrix licenses on your test server so that an annoying popup window does not break your scripts every 10 minutes. Just remember that “officially” Citrix advises against activating your server until it is finalized. It’s your call. See Chapter 14 for the gory details of licensing.)

2. If you haven’t done so already, install the CSTK on your server. (Remember to put your server into install mode first.) After the CSTK is installed, you’ll notice that the “CSTK Client” is automatically launched whenever a user logs on. For now, you can just ignore that.

4. Next, import the application simulation scripts you created in Step 5 into the CSTK environment. This process will make these scripts available to the CSTK. To do this, choose Tools | Add Application Scripts. You can specify anything you want for the Script Name. Use the “Browse” button to browse to the path of the executable of your script. You can specify any necessary command-line parameters in the “Parameters” box. For example, if you used AutoIt to create your script, you might need to specify AutoIt.exe in the “Program Name” box, and yoursrcriptname.txt in the “Parameters” box. Specify whether your application applies to “Normal Users” or “Power Users.” Normal users will only run one script at a time, and power users will run multiple scripts simultaneously.

5. After you’ve added the application scripts, you need to configure groups of test users that will use your scripts (User Group | Add, or click the “+” button on the toolbar). When you specify users, you’re essentially indicating which application scripts run for which users when they log on. When adding a user group, the first question you’re asked is whether you want to add a group of Normal Users or Power Users. Make your selection and click “OK.”

6. Next, you need to specify a range of usernames that will run an application script (or scripts) when they log on. Specify the usernames by entering the basename and the number of users. For example, to apply a script to users “brian1” through “brian5,” you would enter “brian” as the basename and “5” as the number of users. If this is the first time that you’re using the CSTK and you don’t have any test user accounts created, you can click the “Create Users” button. This will create the test user accounts based on the baseline name and number of users. These user accounts are created with blank passwords.

7. Before you click “OK,” highlight the script or scripts that you want this user group to run and click the “Add” button. If you elected to create normal users, selecting multiple scripts will cause the users to run them one by one and the list of available scripts will only show those that you’ve designated for normal users. If you elected to create power users, selecting multiple scripts will cause the users to execute them all at the same time, and the list of available scripts will only show those that you’ve designated for power users. In a sense, normal users execute their application scripts in a “serial” fashion, and power users execute them in a “parallel” fashion.

8. Once you add a group of users and click “OK,” you’ll see them listed on the main CSTK console screen. You can add as many groups of users as you want (as long as the basenames are not the same in two different groups).

9. At this point, the CSTK is fully configured and you should save your testing environment configuration. You can save the entire configuration, including user groups and applications, by choosing File | Save Configuration File. Your settings are then saved as an INI file with a .CST file extension. You can load your settings into the CSTK so that you don’t have to manually set up everything from scratch in the future. When you save a configuration file, it does not include the application script information. When adding application scripts to the CSTK, they are available until they are deleted. If you delete one, loading a configuration file where it was used will not bring it back.

10. In order to begin the testing process, choose Test | Start Test or click the lightning bolt button on the toolbar. You’ll notice that starting the test doesn’t actually do anything. You have to log users on in order for the scripts to execute. This is also a good time to start your performance monitor logging process as described back in Step 6.

11. From one of your ICA client devices, log on as one of your test users. This should be a user that is configured in one of the user groups in the CSTK console. Since a shortcut to the CSTK Client was added to the “All Users\Startup” folder when the CSTK was installed, it will launch after logon and the appropriate application script or scripts will start to run.

12. In order to easily launch multiple ICA sessions from a single 32-bit Windows client device, you can use the CSTK Client Launcher. Log onto a client workstation and run CSTKlaun.exe from the “ClntLaun” folder of the CSTK directory. When you run it, it will detect the path of the ICA client executable (wfcrun.exe). Verify that this path is correct and enter the usernames that you want the sessions to be run from. The username entries follow the same baseline syntax as the groups within the CSTK. For example, if you have 10 test workstations that you plan to use for 10 sessions each, you would configure your CSTK for usernames “test1” through “test100.” Then, you would configure the CSTK Client Launcher to use “test1” through “test10” on the first workstation, “test11” through “test20” on the second workstation, and so on.

13. After you specify the users that will run on a workstation, you need to click the “Create Entries” button in the CSTK Client Launcher to create custom ICA connections for each user in the workstation’s Program Neighborhood. Clicking this button brings up a screen that allows you to specify the default options used for each connection (such as the name of the server to connect to, protocols, etc.) Configure your options as needed and click “OK.”

14. Before you run your test, click the “Advanced Delay” button to specify the delay between sessions. This allows you to specify how much time passes between launching sessions. One of the nice features is that it allows you to specify progressively more time as more sessions are launched, allowing you to anticipate slower responses as the server gets more loaded.

15. After you’ve configured the delay, you can click the “Run” button on the Launcher’s main screen. ICA user sessions will begin to be launched, and they will run the scripts that you specified for the user groups in the CSTK console.

As you add users to your testing environment, you should add them in small groups. For example, if you’re testing 100 users, you might want to add 10 users every five minutes for the first hour or so, and then add users one-by-one. By doing this, you’ll be able to figure out how each user affects the overall system.

Don’t forget to stop your performance monitor recording log once your testing is complete. Once it’s stopped, you can examine it to determine the results of your test.

Step 8. Analyze the Results

Once you’ve stopped your performance monitor log, you can view the results within the Performance MMC console. With the “System Monitor” object highlighted in the left-hand pane, click the button with the picture of the cylinder on it and browse to your log file. This will configure the graph to pull its data from the log file instead of from the current system activity.

Even after you configure the graph to get its data from the log file, you’ll notice that the graph is still blank. You need to manually add the performance counters that you want to view. Use the “+” button on the toolbar, just like you would with live data. The only difference is that when you’re displaying data from a log file, the only performance counters listed will be the ones that you recorded in the log file.As you analyze your results, keep in mind to look for the bottlenecks in your system. Every system will max out at some point. If your system seems to be running out of memory (due to high page faults) then you can probably add more. Once you do that and run the tests again, you might find out that you can support 10 additional users but then your processors start to max out (due to a consistent Processor Queue Length).

Another fact to keep in mind is that when you use the CSTK, the CSTK client utility takes about 2.8MB of server memory for each session that is tested. Also, capturing performance logs takes up system resources.

Based on the data from the log file of your test, you can probably figure out the point in which your server performance starts to fall drastically. Looking at the Active Sessions counter will tell you how many sessions there were when that performance drop occurred. Once you determine how many users your system can hold, you may want to run your tests again. For this second round of tests, you might ask live users to log on in addition to your test users. The live users will be able to tell you whether the system is usable or not.

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This message was originally posted by michaelk4hp on August 20, 2004 Brian, I must say that your timing couldn't more perfect. I was just discussing this same subject with someone inside the company. Great detail....Thanks.

This message was originally posted by an anonymous visitor on August 20, 2004 Brian, this is a nice blueprint to follow, if I can only convince the company to allow me to buy some servers so I can actually build a scaled down version of our production citrix network, instead of continuing to use the production network as a test bed or creating 10 VM boxes on a single workstation w/GIG Ram and one CPU and expect reasonable results. (Sound familiar my fellow Citrixites).

This message was originally posted by an anonymous visitor on September 10, 2004 it's actually a qoutation from the Terminal Services book by Madden...

Which brings me to bringing it up: so far the most extensive testing (user emulation) application that I've seen is the scapa stresstest. However I doubt that it will enable bad connection (or response time) emulation.

This message was originally posted by melanie@scapatechnologies on September 14, 2004 I just wanted to point out that Scapa StressTest does enable this type of emulation (bad connection/response time), although the results are approximate. One of the difficulties in this area is that ICA and RDP protocols are adaptive (to changes or fluctuations in network bandwidth etc.).

This message was originally posted by an anonymous visitor on November 10, 2004 I am trying to research an acceptable value for Memory Pages/Sec on a Citrix server. I understand that ideally there would be none. I see that the recommendation here is to aim for a figure below 20-30 pages/sec. That seems very low to me.

I have seen various other articles that talk about 20 pages/sec (in 1998), 50 pages/sec (in 2000), etc. (Although both of those were not Terminal Server/Citrix specific).

There is also an HP white paper on running Terminal Server on Windows 2003 that more or less says that paging will happen as the load increases by virtue of the operating system trimming out of RAM those pages which are not part of the active working set for each user session and that it's nothing to worry about.

So, can anyone help me with a reply posting here. Why is 20-30 the magic number? Wouldn't the ability of a system to tolerate some paging increase over time as disk sub-systems get faster ? If 20 pages/sec was tolerable back in 1999 and things double every 18 months or so, wouldn't we be looking at 160 pages/sec being OK around now ? Or am I missing something ?

This message was originally posted by same anonymous visitor as previous comment on November 12, 2004 I have found some information on the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit (on-line version) at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/default.asp

Within that, if you navigate to Server Operations Guide, Performance Monitoring, Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage, Investigating Memory Problems and (finally) Investigating Disk Paging, you will find the following quote:

"Acceptable rates for Memory\Pages/sec range from 40 per second on older laptop computers to 150 per second for the newest disk systems."

This brings me back to my original question. Why is a rate of 20-30 considered to be the right measure for a Citrix server ? Does Citrix have a special sensitivity to paging that other types of processes do not have ? And, given that the Resource Kit information was probably released in 2000, as we sit here 4 years later, wouldn't we expect the "acceptable rate" to have increased significantly for a modern server ?

If anyone can comment on this point of view, it would be much appreciated.

Since the previous postings, I have participated in a cycle of testing an application on a Citrix server, using Scapa to create multiple sessions and continually run through an automated cycle of activity in each session. The number of active sessions was gradually stepped-up. The end-user response time of each processing cycle was the prime measure of whether or not the server was over-loaded. At the same time, perfmon was used to monitor the load on the server. In particular, we watched %CPU, Available Memory, Memory Pages/Sec and Disk % Busy and Disk Queue Depth on the volume that holds the Windows Paging file.

The particular application included a Java applet for image viewing, which generated quite heavy CPU usage, so that eventually was the constraining factor. However, at a level before CPU became a constraining factor, the server was sustaining an average Memory Pages/Sec rate of around 140 and maintaining good response times to the Clients. Concurrent with that rate of paging, the Disk % Busy was below 1% and the Disk Queue barely got above zero.

All of this suggests to me that a modern server can cope with a much higher paging rate than the 20-30 suggested here. Once again, my question is, am I missing something ?

For the record, the server was an HPBL20, running Windows 2000 and Citrix XPe, 2 x 2.8GHz Xeons (with HT), 2GB RAM. The Windows Paging file was on a dedicated hard disk, which is a 10krpm SCSI Ultra 320 device.

I would be most grateful if someone could confirm my understanding of this issue or alternatively set me straight on where I have gone wrong.

I'd be curious to see what the breakdown of those was between Pages Input / Sec and Pages Output / Sec (since the Pages / Sec counter is an aggregate of both.)

I do think it's really challenging to come up with hard numbers to use as guidelines, especially since hardware (CPU and disk speed) performance continues to climb. So if you hit 140 and didn't have a problem, I wouldn't worry about it.

IT is intresting since Paging usually tends to slow down the system response time. May I ask a few questions, how many Virtual users you are running on one metaframe and what is the size of that metaframe. Also, do you have terminal services on ?

Can someone point me to any information (document/website) that can provide me with some information on how to set Resource Manager counter levels? I need some information that I can use to refine the settings that I have for some of the counters we have decide to use for our farm servers.

they are part of the reskit...you can download the tsscaling tools at... http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/hotfixes/tscpt-o.asp

from the tsscaling doc... http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/tsscaling.mspx

Testing Tools and Scripts To assist with scalability testing, Microsoft developed the testing tools and scripts used on the client computers to closely simulate an actual user session. Testing Tools Terminal Services Scalability Planning Tools (TSScaling) is a suite of tools that assists organizations with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server capacity planning. They allow organizations to easily place and manage simulated loads on a server. This in turn can allow an organization to determine whether or not its environment is able to handle the load that the organization expects to place on it. The suite includes the following automation tools: Ã¢â¬Â¢ Robosrv.exe, the tool that drives the server side of the load simulation testing. Together RoboServer and RoboClient drive the server-client automation. RoboServer is typically installed on the test controller computer, and must be running before an instance of RoboClient can be started. After an instance of both RoboServer and RoboClient are running, RoboServer commands the RoboClients to run scripts that load the terminal server at operator-specified intervals. Ã¢â¬Â¢ Robocli.exe, the tool that controls the client side of the load simulation testing. Together RoboServer and RoboClient drive the server-client automation. RoboClient is typically installed on the test client computers, and requires RoboServer to be running before an instance of RoboClient can be started. RoboClient receives commands from RoboServer to run scripts that load the terminal server at operator specified intervals.

This counter is usually able to point out network bottlenecks, but it seems in my experience that the values it reports are sporadic/unpredictible. Microsoft says that an output queue length of more than 2 packets is indicative of a bottleneck. Any real-world advice regarding the importance of this metric?

You mean processor queue length? They state keep it under 2 for good performance. But don't forget you can halve this for a dual CPU or divide by 4 for a quad-CPU. For xeon processors, you could divide even further. Typically with processor speeds these days keep processor queue length under 10. I've noted on dual 2.4Ghz Xeon when it goes over 10, you notice a definate reduction in performance

Base on Microsoft Q555223, Pages/sec is not really a problem. The counter you want to watch is Pages Output/sec. Pages Output/sec indicate how many pages are swap out to disk to free some memory. Even on busy system, this counter should be below value of 2.

Also on new server architecture, /3Gb switch in boot.ini should be consider. Many server hardware now permit lot more than 4Gb of RAM. Q294418.

I'm having trouble running the Citrix Server Test Kit with Presentation server 4 running on a Windows 2003 server. We get a login failure either caused by the script failure or simply the server message, Ã¢â¬Åthe system could not log you onÃ¢â¬Â.

Currently the server isnÃ¢â¬â¢t a domain controller. We can run a normal client with out any problems. Can you explain how to configure the test tool or the server to allow this login?

I just ran into the same (I think) problem. I had to add all the users created into the Remote Desktop Users group and I had to assign a password to each user. For some reason I could not use blank passwords even though the Local Security Policy was permitting blank passwords.

they are part of the reskit...you can download the tsscaling tools at... http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/hotfixes/tscpt-o.asp

from the tsscalindsadadasdasdsg doc... http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/tsscaling.mspx

Testing Tools and Scripts To assist with scalability testing, Microsoft developed the testing tools and scripts used on the client computers to closely simulate an actual user session. Testing Tools Terminal Services Scalability Planning Tools (TSScaling) is a suite of tools that assists organizations with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server capacity planning. They allow organizations to easily place and manage simulated loads on a server. This in turn can allow an organization to determine whether or not its environment is able to handle the load that the organization expects to place on it. The suite includes the following automation tools: Ã¢â¬Â¢ Robosrv.exe, the tool that drives the server side of the load simulation testing. Together RoboServer and RoboClient drive the server-client automation. RoboServer is typically installed on the test controller computer, and must be running before an instance of RoboClient can be started. After an instance of both RoboServer and RoboClient are running, RoboServer commands the RoboClients to run scripts that load the terminal server at operator-specified intervals. Ã¢â¬Â¢ Robocli.exe, the tool that controls the client side of the load simulation testing. Together RoboServer and RoboClient drive the server-client automation. RoboClient is typically installed on the test client computers, and requires RoboServer to be running before an instance of RoboClient can be started. RoboClient receives commands from RoboServer to run scripts that load the terminal server at operator specified intervals.

I believe these are the same tools that MSFT used to say you could get ~300 users on one Windows 2003 server, so I'd be careful about using them as your only metric. I believe both Benny Tritsch and Brian have posted articles on how to real capacity testing. Benny's can be found here:

It's too early to consider this tool at this time since RDP support is only planned at this stage, but when DaNamik LoadGen supports RDP it'll be a killer tool for this type of testing. See http: Shawn

I have a question about possible tuning techniques. Our systems are showing high paging rates (over 50 per second sustained) ,however it shows 2 GB's of available memory. The total memory is 4 GB, the disk % is relatively low, and I see no other bottlenecks.

Are there tuning options with to allow more memory usage or am I just missing something?

I just want to ask about the Rational Performance Tester. I am having trouble running a test on a CITRIX server. I only have one (1) account that has access on the server and I have to log-in every time I use the application. I use an ICA file to connect to the server. My problem is that I cant perform a test with multiple iterations using only one (1) account. Only one virtual user were able to login successfully to the server and perform the recorded test while the other users were met with a login confirmation. I would like to know if there is a way for me to perform multiple iterations at the same time using only one account. If not please provide some alternative solutions to my problem. Thank you in advance and please just email me you answer to the email address provided thank you. p.natanawan@spi-bpo.com

The article doesn't address <a href="www.successful-thinclient-projects.com/citrix-end-to-end-testing.html">end to end testing</a> and only looks at testing and monitoring the Citrix presentation elements. From experience the application, data access and data storage layers aswell as the network infrastructure involved such as proxies, firewalls, switches etc. all contribute to the usability of any system. Step 5. Introduces load onto the servers from the test script engines which will make the testing not representative of how the servers will be used in live.